I've worked with a lot of directors, some of them you wouldn't really attach the word 'artist' to their name.

I think somewhere around high school, your brain starts to gel, to harden. Before that, there’s this time where anything is possible and the more things that you artistically and educationally have in your repertoire, the more you become a child of larger possibilities.

When I was a kid, I would go to the record store, where there was a bin of things they didn't know quite how to classify. Those were my choices. That's where you would find Captain Beefheart or an early electronic album.

With MTV in the '80s, you made your album but then you needed to use any money you made to create a video - instead of being able to use that money to pay for you and your band to live on while you wrote new songs. So MTV upped the ante of looking for one hit. Conceptual bands who didn't have a hit were going to lose.

Choose your mutations carefully...

This is the fourth movie that I've done with this set of director-writers and I've learned to trust them at this point, because actually I started on Lego before they did.

The stories I write are often literal to events that have happened or observations that I've made, and sometimes they're fantastical.